Vertigo’s long-running series HELLBLAZER is coming to an end, and that makes us very sad.

Featuring comics most charming leading man, John Constantine, a black magic con-artist created by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, John Totleben and Rick Veitch, HELLBLAZER has been published continuously since January 1988 and boasts an undeniable assortment of the greatest creative talent working in comics the last 30 years. With memorable runs from authors like Garth Ennis, Paul Jenkins, Warren Ellis, Mike Carey, Brian Azzarello, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Denise Mina, and a returning-to-glory Peter Milligan all drawn by a dream-list of amazing artists like Simon Bisley, Mark Buckingham, Richard Corben, Steve Dillon, Marcelo Frusin, Jock, David Lloyd, Leonardo Manco, Sean Phillips and John Ridgway.

Our comics reading just won’t be the same without our monthly crawl into the dark world this series has so effectively delivered for so many years. It’s been depressing to see how poorly DC has handled the series, to be honest. So many of the classic runs have gone out of print and never returned, because nobody wants to read Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis comics, right? (shakes head). And even when they managed to come up with clever marketing ploys to help promote a great new run on the series… they just didn’t bother to tell anyone. Did you know that DC gave away a HELLBLAZER trenchcoat covered in original Simon Bisley artwork at Comic Con last year? Yeah, neither would we… if we weren’t there to see it happen. Seriously, what was the point?!

DC is relaunching the book with a more sanitized, continuity-friendly new PG-rated version and I guess that’s kind of nice. But unless it motivates the company to re-release some of those old, out of print runs I just can’t feel excited about any of it. This whole thing is just sad, sad news for comics.

But who knows? Constantine has a knack for getting himself into the worst situations possible and doing something amazing at the very last second… here’s hoping he can cheat death just one more time.